Dhe chair in the middle of the stage, an Eames chair covered with gray fabric, remains empty. Actually, Jehad Ahmad, the chairman of the Palestinian Community in Hesse, should have been there, but shortly before the event he backed out. That wasn’t the only cancellation. The organizers were also turned down by several Palestinian artists and journalists who were asked to take part in the discussion. The empty chair should now make it clear: an important voice is missing in this debate. The chair therefore functions, as the artist Hito Steyerl puts it, as a “representation of the gap”.
Once again it’s about the Documenta and its anti-Semitism scandal on Thursday evening in the main auditorium of the University of Applied Science. The discussion, in which, for whatever reason, no Palestinian representative wants to take part, is part of an international conference at the Frankfurt University entitled “Beyond – Towards a Future Practice of Remembrance”. It is about how the culture of remembrance of the Holocaust will change, should change, in a country that is increasingly determined by migration. It’s about colonial guilt, about Eurocentrism, about the question of whether the Holocaust can be compared to other genocides. In other words, topics that could have been discussed in detail at the Documenta – but there, one has to realize this bitterly towards the end of the Kassel art show, an open discourse was probably never desired.
No escape
However, lively debates took place on the podium in Frankfurt. Sitting there on the evening of the first day of the conference are the journalist and writer Nele Pollatschek, Julia Yael Alfandari, the head of political education at the Anne Frank educational center, and Hito Steyerl, the artist who had her contributions to the Documenta, an installation and a video work, dismantled , because she couldn’t bear that there was no argument about anti-Semitism at the art exhibition.
Steyerl’s descriptions make it clear how poisoned and deadlocked the situation at the Documenta was right from the start. She saw no other way out than to withdraw from the art show. On the Audimax stage, she describes how she felt pushed into a corner. “I noticed that early on: There will be no more discourse there,” recalls Steyerl. She felt as if she had to decide between “whether I am against racism or against anti-Semitism”. “I thought: That’s crazy,” said Steyerl. Especially in a country that is equally characterized by anti-Semitism and racism, by the attacks in Halle, in Hanau and the NSU murder series. “I don’t live in a country where Halle or Hanau took place, but where Halle and Hanau took place.”
Julia Yael Alfandari reported on the educational work that the educational institution wanted to do at the Documenta at a stand on Friedrichsplatz. But instead of providing information about anti-Semitism and racism, they were primarily confronted with anti-Semitic clichés and conspiracy myths. Most of these crude statements came from people “from the German bourgeois milieu,” reports Alfandari. “It became clear to me there how strongly anti-Semitism is still anchored in our society.”
